Optical waves exhibit a lot of interesting properties at high intensities. Namely, material properties thought to be constant, become intensity dependent, such as refractive index. This implies that at high light intensities, glass acts more like quartz refractively, due to the atomic structure and lattice composition of the material.
In one of my classes, I modeled the evolution of a gaussian pulse though a highly non-linear optical fiber. Under specific conditions, modulation instability may take place, a complex interplay between four wave mixing and self phase modulation. This results in a temporal sharpening of the pulse, something that occurs very infrequently in fiber optics. These effects have been observed in optical rogue waves, and in many areas of nature.
The Split-Step Fourier method was employed in Matlab to generate the pulse profile by separately calculating the dispersive and nonlinear effects. The initial pulse begins at distance = 0 (distance through the optical fiber) and is compressed before demodulating into a quasi-CW pattern after some time. The scientific validity of the simulation is questionable, but the process of learning assoiciated with it, is not.